NU: Faculty-student research findings accepted for presentation at international writing conference

by jmaloni

Submitted

Tue, Feb 18th 2014 03:00 pm

A study
conducted by a Niagara University professor and five of his students has been
accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Writing Research,
one of the foremost writing conferences in Europe.

Dr.
Joseph Little will travel to the University of Amsterdam this August to present
the group's findings related to Sheryl I. Fontaine's analysis of the four core
functions of "freewriting," the act of transcribing one's unedited thoughts for
an uninterrupted period of time.

Undertaken
as part of one of Little's 300-level English courses (writing and well-being),
students examined 163 freewrites for their final paper, the results of which Little
is now comparing with his own findings in preparation for his presentation this
Aug. 27-29.

"These
students conducted a very thorough investigation of anonymous, online
freewrites, with the intent of determining how the data would corroborate or
refute Fontaine's four functions of freewriting. In addition, we believe that
we have found potential fifth and sixth functions that are not accounted for in
Fontaine's study," said Little, who possesses an M.A. and Ph.D. from the
University of California, Santa Barbara. "I'm grateful to work at a university
that encourages this kind of faculty-student collaborative research."

The
abstract of "Functional Variety in
Freewriting: A Response to Fontaine" appears below:

"In the two decades since James Pennebaker's
(Pennebaker and Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, 1997) pioneering work at the
intersection of writing and healing, a generation of studies has yielded
impressive, sometimes startling, results: Freewriting, we now know, is correlated
with improved health responses among patients suffering from illnesses ranging
from asthma and rheumatoid arthritis (Smyth et al., 1999) to cancer (Zakowski
et al., 2004) and compromised immune systems (Petrie et al., 2004); freewriting
is also associated with psychosocial improvement among writers confronting and
re-organizing the experience of past traumas (Pennebaker, 1997).

"In all of these studies, the act of freewriting
itself has been identified as the independent measure, the various measures of
well-being understood as the dependent measures. Neglected in this research are
the kinds of psychosocial work being accomplished by the freewriting.

"Only Fontaine (1991) has investigated the
functions of freewriting, in this case among approximately 200 of her students'
anonymous writings. Fontaine then concludes that freewriting serves one of four
functions for the writer: to record real or imagined experiences, to make plans
or set goals, to problem solve, or to evaluate one's personal experiences
including emotions. That's it, that's all.

"In the proposed short presentation, I will present
the findings of our examination of 163 anonymous freewriting entries collected
through the Internet. (This ongoing work is a collaborative effort among myself
and several students in my Writing and Well-Being class, and has been approved
by our university's research ethics board.) I will begin by offering
descriptive statistics regarding the degree to which our data corroborates
Fontaine's four functions of freewriting. I will then introduce a fifth, sixth,
and possibly a seventh additional function of freewriting, which is not
accounted for by Fontaine's study. These findings will shine light on the role
of inner speech in the practice of freewriting as well as further the
conversation in general on the myriad purposes that draw people to freewriting
as an effective self-management tool. I will close the presentation by
suggested future avenues of research for writing scholars interested in
advancing the important discussions taking place at the intersection of writing
and well-being."